Fold - What's Next?
Does anyone know what is up with Fold? They surfaced as a competitor in the StartPage category and then vanished before you could say “Web 2.0.”A number of notable bloggers mentioned the rise and fall of Fold, asserting that it was one of the first Web 2.0 companies to go kaput. I did a little digging recently, however, and found that there might be more to the “fold of Fold" than we all thought.
Google "fold.com" and you will find a rather cryptic result listing stating, "Everything you read about Fold is wrong." Also, their web site has some weird barcode stuff on display. There is probably nothing behind the whole thing, but I have to admit that I am absolutely intrigued. If anyone has any dish, let me know.
technorati tags: fold, startpage, web2.0
posted by Hooman @ 12:57 PM
3 Comments:
At 7:34 AM,
Anonymous said…
I remember the whole big cha-bang on Fold. The beta was supposed to come out in February or March this year. I think Fold was one of those great idea web 2.0 concepts that sacrificed userbility and aesthetics for functionality. This was a company destined for the downfall from the beginning, the first of which was the 100% shunning of its usage on IE. Doing that was a huge risk and to shoot yourself in the foot like that without a "strong" following, without a name but just hype and before your beta is even out was a total sense of idiocacy and stupidity. I actually had tested the beta and it had still alot of work to do within the aesthetics part and found its usage choopy, clunky and almost unusable. Good concept though but they were their own worst enemies. Shows you that in this world, you can just live on hype, you have to be smart and practical as well. Don't we all remember the dot-com days i.e. Companies with all hype but no substance? I kind of forgot about Fold until you mentioned it in your article, ah yes, the famous barcode explaination - maybe ye ole Mr. Alex Wolf went on to work for a barcode company. ;-)
At 9:15 PM,
Hooman said…
HA HA HA. Very smart thinking. I agree that Fold definitely had some neat stuff going on. They had some serious security issues as well with respect to their framework. Who knows, maybe they will come back soon!
At 3:50 AM,
Anonymous said…
Shame. I liked the service, it was more useful and better than Netvibs or Pakeflags, don't know of any security problems. Seems they are now a company that sells Barcode Software.
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